The Red Butte Western is a railroad in the Southwest. When the owners decide to do away with the long prevailing lawless conditions on the road they choose a young engineer to go out there and do the "taming." Having failed hopelessly on one memorable occasion to display any manly courage, he believes himself to be a physical coward and consequently wholly unfit for the task. He confesses this feeling to the vice-president of the road, but this fails to shake the official's confidence in the young man. He has a hard struggle against lawlessness, strikes, collisions, wrecks and bloodshed, but wins out and proves beyond a doubt that he is possessed of no small amount of physical and moral courage.

think I must have been hypnotized. I stood there like a frozen image, and let that crippled cow-rustler rob those two women--take the rings from their fingers!"

"Oh, hold on; there's another side to all that, and you know it," the vice-president began; but Lidgerwood would not listen.

"No," he protested; "don't try to find excuses for me; there were none. The fellow gave me every chance; turned his back on me as an absolutely negligible factor while he was going through the others. I'm quick enough when the crisis doesn't involve a fighting man's chance; and I can handle a gun, too, when the thing to be shot at isn't a human being. But to save my soul from everlasting torments I couldn't go through the simple motions of pulling the pistol from my pocket and dropping that fellow in his tracks; couldn't and didn't."

"Why, of course you couldn't, after it had got that far along," asserted Ford. "I doubt if any one could. That little remark about the gun in your pocket did you up. When a man